Brazil: A Biography

A sweeping and absorbing biography of Brazil from the sixteenth century to the present For many Americans Brazil is a land of contradictions: vast natural resources and entrenched corruption; extraordinary wealth and grinding poverty; beautiful beaches and violence-torn favelas. Brazil occupies a vivid place in the American imagination and yet it remains largely unknown. In an extraordinary journey that spans five hundred years from European colonization to the 2016 Summer Olympics Lilia M. Schwarcz and Heloisa M. Starlings Brazil offers a rich dramatic history of this complex country. The authors not only reconstruct the epic story of the nation but follow the shifting byways of food art and popular culture; the plights of minorities; and the ups and downs of economic cycles. Drawing on a range of original scholarship in history anthropology political science and economics Schwarcz and Starling reveal a long process of unfinished social political and economic progress and struggle a story in which the troubled legacy of the mixing of races and postcolonial political dysfunction persist to this day.